How the Survivors of Parkland Began the Never Again Movement

David Hogg is one of the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, in Parkland, Florida, who started the Never Again movement, to advocate for gun control, after a mass shooting at their school.Photograph by Jonathan Drake / Reuters

By Sunday, only four days after the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, the activist movement that
emerged in its aftermath had a name (Never Again), a policy goal
(stricter background checks for gun buyers), and a plan for a nationwide
protest (a March for Our Lives, scheduled for March 24th). It also had a
panel of luminary teens who were reminding America that the shooting was
not a freak accident or a natural disaster but the result of actual
human decisions.

The funerals continued in Parkland and surrounding cities—for the
students Jaime Guttenberg and Joaquin Oliver and Alex Schachter and the
geography teacher Scott Beigel—with attendance sometimes surpassing a
thousand people. On a local level, at least, the activism did not
overshadow the grieving. The tragedy affected this student body of more
than three thousand people in different ways: some students lost their
closest friends, others hallway acquaintances. And the student leaders
knew, with the clarity of thought that had distinguished them from the
beginning, that the headline-industrial complex granted only a very
narrow window of attention. Had they waited even a week to start
advocating for change, the reporters would have gone home.

Also, different people express grief in different ways. The activists
are grieving, too, but it’s not a coincidence that a disproportionate
number of the Never Again leaders are dedicated members of the drama
club. Cameron Kasky is a theatre kid. Before he went on Anderson Cooper,
he was best known as a class clown. “I’m a talker,” he told me. “The
only thing I’ve had this whole time is the fact that I never shut up.”
Kasky started writing Facebook posts in the car after he and his
brother, who has special needs, were picked up after the shooting by
their dad. “I’m safe,” he wrote in the first, posted two hours after the
shooting. “Thank you to all the second amendment warriors who protected
me.” For the rest of the day, in between posts about missing students
and recalling the experience of hiding in a classroom with his brother,
Kasky’s frustration grew: “Can’t sleep. Thinking about so many things.
So angry that I’m not scared or nervous anymore . . . I’m just angry,” he
wrote. “I just want people to understand what happened and understand
that doing nothing will lead to nothing. Who’d have thought that concept
was so difficult to grasp?”

The social-media posts led to an invitation from CNN to write an op-ed,
which led to televised interviews in the course of the day. “People are
listening and people care,” Kasky wrote. “They’re reporting the right
things.” That night, Thursday, after the candlelight vigil ended, Kasky
invited a few friends over to his house to try to start a movement.
“Working on a central space that isn’t just my personal page for all of
us to come together and change this,” he posted. “Stay alert. #NeverAgain.” He had thought of the name, he later told me, “while
sitting on the toilet in my Ghostbuster pajamas.” In early interviews
Kasky had criticized the Republican Party, but he and his friends had
decided since that the movement should be nonpartisan. Surely
everyone—gun owner or pacifist, conservative or liberal—could agree that
school massacres should be stopped. The group stayed up all night
creating social-media accounts and trying to figure out what needed to
be said, “because the important thing here wasn’t talking about gore,”
Kasky said on Sunday. “It was talking about change and it was talking
about remembrance.” It was then that they decided to petition for more
thorough background checks. As Alfonso Calderon, a co-founder of Never
Again, who was there that night, told me, “Nikolas Cruz, the shooter at
my school, was reported to the police thirty-nine times.” He added, “We
have to vote people out who have been paid for by the N.R.A. They’re
allowing this to happen. They’re making it easier for people like Nick
Cruz to acquire an AR-15.”

They launched their new Facebook page just before midnight on February
15th. “Thank you to everybody who has been so supportive of our
community and please remember to keep the memory of those beloved people
we’ve lost fresh in your minds,” Kasky wrote.

While Kasky, Calderon, and their other friends huddled among snack
wrappers in a gated-community war room, another student was developing a
different plan. Jaclyn Corin is the seventeen-year-old junior-class
president at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. She woke up the morning after the
attack to the confirmation that her missing friend, Joaquin Oliver, was
among the dead. She cried so hard that her parents had to hold her down.
She also started posting on social media. “PLEASE contact your local and
state representatives, as we must have stricter gun laws IMMEDIATELY,”
she wrote on Instagram. It was after she went to grief counselling, and
after the candlelight vigil that evening, that Corin first talked to
the Democratic Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Conversations
with state representatives followed, and preliminary arrangements were
made to bus a hundred Douglas students and fifteen chaperones to
Tallahassee to address the state legislature. Yesterday, I asked Corin
if she had been politically active before the shooting. “Not even a
little bit,” she said. “It’s so personal now. I would feel, like,
horrible if I didn’t do anything about it, and my coping mechanism is to
distract myself with work and helping people.” Corin was also prepared
to advocate for gun-law reform, having worked on a fifty-page project
about gun control for her A.P. composition-and-rhetoric class a couple
of months before. “We have grown up with this problem,” she said, when I
asked how the students had been so ready to argue the issue. “We knew
this stuff. It’s not like a new, fresh horrible thing that’s happening,
it’s been preëxisting even before we entered the world.”

By Friday, Corin had accepted an invitation from Kasky to join forces
under Never Again. By Saturday, other students who had been
independently talking to the media about gun control had joined, too—names that are now becoming familiar to the American public: David Hogg,
the reporter for the school paper who appeared on national news
broadcasts the morning after the shooting demanding action from elected
officials; Sarah Chadwick, whose profanity-laced tweet criticizing Trump
went viral soon after the shooting; and Emma (“We Call B.S.”) González,
whose speech became the defining moment of a gun-control rally in Fort
Lauderdale on Saturday. González, a senior, gave her first CNN interview
on the night of the vigil. The invitation to speak at the rally had
followed, and she wrote her speech the day she gave it. She had not
anticipated how widely it would be shared. (Her last experience of
activism, she told me, had been last year’s underwhelming March for
Science.) She had simply written down the thoughts she had been sharing
with her friends. “This is how I’m dealing with my grief,” she said.
“The thing that caused me grief, the thing that had no right to cause me
grief, the thing that had no right to happen in the first place, I have
to do something actively to prevent it from happening to somebody else.”
Kasky recruited Hogg and González for Never Again at the rally, where he
also spoke.

“We said, ‘We are the three voices of this.’ We’re strong, but together
we’re unstoppable,” Kasky said. “Because David has an amazing composure,
he’s incredibly politically intelligent; I have a little bit of
composure; and Emma, beautifully, has no composure, because she’s not
trying to hide anything from anybody.” “All these kids are drama kids,
and I’m a dramatic kid, so it really meshes well,” González added.

Following the Fort Lauderdale rally, after more media interviews, Kasky
invited everyone over for a slumber party. “We were just saying, ‘O.K.,
look, we need to have preparation and beauty sleep,’ ” he said. There was
very little sleep.

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On Sunday, having announced the March for Our Lives on the morning talk
shows, the activists stood in the shade of a picnic pavilion in North
Community Park, less than half a mile from the flower-bedecked fences of
their cordoned-off high school. They had issued an open invitation to
the media to come find them in the park later that afternoon. Until
then, they fielded stray interviews, caught up on loose ends, and
occasionally broke into tears. González, whose shaved head had inspired
online imitators in recent days, was seated at a picnic table with her
mother, looking for a profile photo for her new Twitter account. Corin
spoke to a pregnant local-news anchor. I was greeted by Calderon, who
wore a tomato-red shirt and a blue tie to make it easy for reporters to
identify him.

At the very least, the students had prolonged the news cycle. Corin would
be leading her delegation to Tallahassee to meet with state
representatives on Wednesday. Hogg and Kasky would be travelling to
Washington, D.C., and New York for media appearances and to begin
preparations for the March for Our Lives. Chadwick would continue
her relentless online criticisms, turning her attention next to Marco
Rubio and Tomi Lahren. (“I’m never going to stop talking about this,”
she told me. “I’m not going to let people forget about the seventeen who
lost their lives.”)

Other students would maintain operations at home, in Parkland. A local
march was being considered, and then there was the President’s
“listening session” with Douglas students that had been announced by the
White House. The President, who has a house forty minutes away, and who
had been in town over the weekend, had not yet said the words “Never
Again,” and had timed the meeting in Parkland to coincide with the
exodus of activist students to Tallahassee. Still, many of them would be
staying in Parkland, as they had funerals to attend. Corin was urging
her friends to “prioritize the comfort aspect first, prioritize the
funerals, prioritize the victims’ families, prioritize all of that
first, and then focus on the politics.”

The activists are wary about what form the backlash against them will
take. They have learned statistics and the names of proposed laws, but
they know it might not be enough.

“Our generation just isn’t allowed to screw up in any way, shape, or
form,” Calderon told me. “Even before this happened, we already knew all
the facts. We already knew everything.” But, he continued, their margin
of error was so slim. I asked what he meant by screwing up. “At least in
my short lifetime, I know that politicians have always screwed up,” he
explained. “They have always said the wrong thing at the wrong time, and
they’re still taken seriously, time and time again, instead of being
disavowed or disqualified for even holding an office after saying
ridiculous statements. Meanwhile, my generation is—for example, Emma
González, she’s an inspiration to us and she’s working for us, but, if
she were to say something that was non-factual, you know she would be
highly scrutinized by literally everybody, including the President. I
wouldn’t be surprised if he tweeted about Emma González saying that she
is a domestic terrorist. And I can tell you, Emma, because I know her
personally, she’s just a young girl like us, she’s no different than any
of us, she’s just getting more media attention and that’s about it. She
just wants to make a difference, too. And even though we’re not aiming
for the highest glass ceiling out there, we have to make the first
step.”

Calderon told me that he once ran into Nikolas Cruz at a Walmart
with a friend who knew him. This was after Cruz had been expelled from
Stoneman Douglas. The two friends stood and listened as Cruz bragged
about a shotgun he had just bought. The moment has been weighing on
Calderon—he wishes he had told someone. As I talked to him, I wished
that he didn’t have to carry such regrets. Other people had expressed
fear of Cruz to law enforcement in the past, and none of it had kept
Cruz from his guns. The first step of the Never Again movement was
believing in an idea that the rest of America had grown too cynical to
imagine: that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High really could be the last
school shooting in America.